A Name and a waiting...

A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man's-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, with thanks to  inward/outward

Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences--because it is there to be done, and so is a manifestation of the Will of God... The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. Faithfulness means continuing quietly with the job we have been given, in the situation where we have been placed; not yielding to the restless desire for change. It means tending the lamp quietly for God without wondering how much longer it has got to go on. Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at 30 miles per hour.

Evelyn Underhill, The Fruits of the Spirit.

People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.

Meister Eckhart, with thanks to  inward/outward

Sorry for the silence since Connect 2010. I've been trying to make sense of my own feelings. Nearly a week of being so close with my sisters and brothers in Christ, of worship and prayer and talking, of just being church, is not easy to put into words. It might sound trite to some to call it a glimpse of Heaven, of the Kingdom to which our Lord is betrothed, but honestly that's how it was.

Things are not going to be the same, even if there is not another Connect in next or subsequent years, even if those who were there try to forget what they saw, and heard, and felt. The Church (deliberate big 'C') in the Isle of Purbeck knows now, very practically and simply, that it is one, that our different ways of doing things, our different comfort zones in worship and in the minor application of doctrine, are pretty irrelevant beside the great love our Lord has put into our hearts one for another...

"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:35)

We are in a state of waiting. The Kingdom is here,  and yet it has not yet come. (Mark 1:15; Luke 11:2; 11:20; 12:31) And yet we are not alone, far from it. Our waiting lives within the Name of Jesus; all we are is in his wounded hands. What shall we fear? (Romans 8:28-39)

Tomorrow, I'm off to Hilfield Friary, for the Caring for Creation in a World of Crisis weekend. More when I get back, I hope...

Community? What do we know…?

At Connect 2010 at Holton Lee—we’re having a glorious time, despite the wind and the rain, and the very hard work by the organising team keeping everything running notwithstanding—I’ve been profoundly moved by the team from the Lee Abbey Community in particular. Yesterday morning, the Warden, David Rowe, spoke well about the work and the foundation of Lee Abbey; but what touched me, as a Franciscan, more than anything were the accounts by various community members, both young and not quite so young, of how they had come to Lee Abbey, and their experience of living in community there.

As we in the three Orders (First Order Brothers and Sisters, Second Order Sisters, and the sisters and brothers of the Third Order) of the Society of St. Francis consider afresh what being a community in Christ really means, we need I believe to look very closely at the experience of communities outside the ARC Yearbook, and especially at their sometimes very different take on spiritual formation.

I am very excited about all this, I have to admit, and I’m really looking forward to more conversations with my sisters and brothers from other kinds of communities. Our God is a God of community, from his very nature as Trinity on out to all the farthest reaches of incarnation, the finest capillaries and nerve endings of the body of Christ. I’m convinced that this is an urgent—maybe our most urgent—calling, the very heart of how we as Christians can serve those who do not yet know their Saviour and their King…

Connect 2010 begins...

Not sure how much I’ll be able to blog for the rest of this week, as I’m at Connect 2010 at Holton Lee.

Just found this wonderful quote from Richard Rohr, which pretty much sums up how I’m feeling!

God cares, for some wonderful reason, despite all of our smallness and silliness. Divine love does not depend on our doing nice or right things. Divine love is not determined by the worthiness of the object of love but by the Subject, who is always and only Love. God does not love us if we change, as we almost all think; but God loves us so that we can change.

No matter what we do, God, in great love and humility, says, “That’s what I work with. That’s all I work with!” It’s the mustard seed with which God does great things. Our life experiences, “good and bad alike,” are invited to the great wedding feast (Matthew 22:10). They are the raw material that God uses to prepare the banquet.

Richard Rohr
June 2010